Nothing ever trickled down. What power we had to recapture the gains you and your parents worked hard for has been whittled away by years of anti-labor legislation and rhetoric.
Negotiating for increased wage for the average laborer in a non-unicorn market is difficult. Without union representation, it is a solitary worker with little funds versus firms and industries made up thousands of well-moneyed and well-lawyered people who share the same interest in wanting to make sure you never see more money than they absolutely have to give you. Without solidarity, you can be fired and replaced without repercussions for your employer from your fellow workers, all of whom share the interest in seeing you get paid fairly so that one day they might, too.
Globalization has made it easy to avoid pesky things like fair compensation, hours, working conditions, benefits and taxes that we've come to take for granted in the US.
Sad to say, I'm not aware of any books that tell the whole international story.
For the USA, there have been an abundance of books and articles showing the decline of the middle class:
http://billmoyers.com/2015/01/26/middle-class/
Tyler Cowen came up with the phrase Great Stagnation:
http://www.amazon.com/Great-Stagnation-America-Low-Hanging-E...
Some writers treat this as a political issue:
http://www.amazon.com/Boiling-Point-Republicans-Middle-Class...
Some writers focus on long-term factors that have little to do with politics. Robert Gordon got good reviews for his historical analysis of the specialness of the 2nd Industrial Revolution 1860-1940, and why the current era is not as robust:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Fall-American-Growth/dp/06911...
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1949908
Lo thinks that the Reinhart/Rogoff This Time is Different is among the best-researched texts with the most quantitative support and analysis while still maintaining its readability.
The oil crisis gave the Right a convenient pretext to blame wage increases for inflation.
This became a standard element of economic orthodoxy, and ever since then increases in wages and salaries - which were a driver of post-war prosperity - have been labelled "inflationary', even though inflation is primarily caused by other factors.[1]
By a remarkable and unexpected coincidence, this was the moment when labour share of GDP and middle class prosperity both started to decline. See e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_share#/media/File:Adjuste...
[1] The Bank of England always plays on this. About a year ago there was talk of increasing interest rates to "head off inflationary pressure" just in case wages might have started rising in the future. Meanwhile asset inflation in the form of rising property prices is ignored, and more obvious drivers of increasing costs, like consumer energy prices, are downplayed.
Where a highschool-educated man once could get s factory job and buy a house on that salary, a modern young person gets a part-time job with an expensive degree and uses it to pay off a pile of student debt and while a house is completely out of reach.
The UK has a skills shortage, it's vacancy to applicants ratio is back to pre-recession levels despite huge levels of immigration from the EU. London is the 6th largest French city in terms of population, tens of thousands of millennials from Southern and Eastern Europe have migrated to the UK. This is brilliant because they are often well educated (by someone else) and motivated - we have several recently arrived European devs in our office.
However at the same time it takes people longer to get into jobs. Since the 90s the concept of a degree being a pre-requisite for professional jobs has been pushed and pushed. I remember at my grammar school it being assumed you were going to university. Combine this with the rise of the "gap year" and people are emerging into the job market years later than they used to, with different expectations about the kind of work they will do. The article (it is the Guardian after all) highlighted a charity sector employee - not a sector you traditionally associate with pay rises keeping up with the commercial sector. I know far too many acquaintances who emerged from university unwilling to work for a profit making enterprise.
Many European countries, especially in the south, have completely different issues - huge problems with youth unemployment which is driving emigration. A labour market which has two tiers of employees due to the difficulty of laying off permanent employees causing young people to disproportionately end up on casual contracts.
Someone much better placed will no doubt be able to explain the issues in the US and Canada, indeed I'd be unsurprised if there weren't different issues within the US.
There is a shortage of jobs, which things like workfare don't help with (if there is a job, just employ these people).
It's clearly for the job market overall, there will be variation within sectors. Given over 2 million private sector jobs have been created over the past few years while the public sector has shed jobs I doubt workfare is involved.
Admittedly a lot of arts grads don't get jobs as artists, where most CS grads are only really interested in a programming job.
But even so - the skills shortage is somewhat mythical.
As you say - the remuneration shortage is more obvious than the skill shortage.
Housing costs in London are in the same ballpark as SF, but £40k is considered a generous salary for permanent developers. £60k might be possible for seniors.
It isn't unusual to find web dev jobs offering <£20k.
Work in the City offers much better pay, but the culture can be pretty horrific for anyone who isn't suited to it.
Tech is a winner-take-all industry. You get nothing for being second place. This requires long-working hours (it needed to ship yesterday!) and people you can exploit (younger folks who don't know any better). Moreover, the ever changing nature of languages and tools makes it that on the surface, a young person in their mid to late 20s seems as much experience as an older person. When you combine this, you get shitty software that has shipped fast.
Can we do anything about it? Unionizing software or having some kind of guild membership is not going to happen in my lifetime. (we're all too libertarian). We can slow down the churn of tools (this is also hard and requires discipline ... if we all understood the damage caused by the new new thing, maybe we can do it but I doubt it - can you make a promise to NOT learn any new languages this year? I don't know if I can). We can do our own startups (this requires access to funds that not everyone has, and perhaps a particular lifestyle situation; also ... odds of me getting into something like YC are near 0 I feel). Or, we can change fields. As someone who loves tech and not much else, I have severe doubts I'll be able to find something I have as much passion for as tech. But hey ... who knows. Life is a new adventure everyday :)
[Disclaimer: somewhat of a hippie myself, but there's a lot of hypocrisy in that area.]
I suggest reading "the great wave: price revolutions and the rhythm of history". I found it to be a surprisingly easy read.